After five years pursuing the social-local-mobile dream, we need a fresh paradigm for technology startups.

Finnish teenagers performing digital ennui in 1996 2006. Reuters.

We're there. The future that visionaries imagined in the late 1990s of phones in our pockets and high-speed Internet in the air: Well, we're living in it.

"The third generation of data and voice communications -- the convergence of mobile phones and the Internet, high-speed wireless data access,
intelligent networks, and pervasive computing -- will shape how we work, shop, pay bills, flirt, keep appointments, conduct wars, keep up with our
children, and write poetry in the next century."

That's Steve Silberman reporting for Wired in 1999, which was 13 years ago, if you're keeping count. He was right, and his prediction proved correct before this century even reached its teens. Indeed, half of tech media is devoted to precisely how these devices and their always-on connectivity let us do new things, help us forget old
things, and otherwise provide humans with as much change as we can handle.

I can take a photo of a check and deposit it in my bank account, then turn around and find a new book through a Twitter link and buy it, all while being surveilled by a drone in Afghanistan and keeping track of how many steps I've walked.

The question is, as it has always been: now what?

Decades ago, the answer was, "Build the Internet." Fifteen years ago, it was, "Build the Web." Five years ago, the answers were probably, "Build the social network" or "Build the mobile web." And it was in around that time in 2007 that Facebook emerged as the social
networking leader, Twitter got known at SXSW, and we saw the release of the first Kindle and the first iPhone. There are a lot of new phones that look like the
iPhone, plenty of e-readers that look like the Kindle, and countless social networks that look like Facebook and Twitter. In other words, we can cross that task off the list. It happened.

What we've seen since have been evolutionary improvements on the patterns established five years ago. The platforms that
have seemed hot in the last couple of years -- Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest -- add a bit of design or mobile intelligence to the established ways of
thinking. The most exciting thing to come along in the consumer space between then and now is the iPad. But despite its glorious screen and extended battery life, it really is a scaled up iPhone that offers developers more space and speed to do roughly the same things they were doing before. The top apps for the iPad look startlingly similar the top apps for the iPhone: casual games, social networking, light productivity software.

For at least five years, we've been working with the same operating logic in the consumer technology game. This is what it looks like:

There will be ratings and photos and a network of friends
imported, borrowed, or stolen from one of the big social networks. There will be an emphasis on connections between people, things, and places. That is
to say, the software you run on your phone will try to get you to help it understand what and who you care about out there in the world. Because all that stuff can be transmuted into valuable information for advertisers.

That paradigm has run its course. It's not quite over yet, but I think we're into the mobile social fin de siècle.

PARADIGM LOST

It slipped into parody late last year with the hypothetical app, Jotly, which allowed you to "rate everything" from the ice cubes in your drink to the fire hydrant you saw on the street. The fake promo video perfectly nailed everything about the herd mentality among startups. Its creator told me to watch for "the color blue, rounded corners, SoLoMo [SocialLocalMobile], ratings, points, free iPads,
ridiculous name (complete with random adverbing via 'ly'),
overpromising, private beta, giant buttons, 'friction-less' sign up, no
clear purpose, and of course a promo video."

That's the microversion of the state of affairs. Here's the macro version. Thousands of startups are doing almost exactly the same thing, minor variations on a
theme. Tech journalists report endlessly on the same handful of well-established companies. Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and
Microsoft's dominate pieces of the web, and they don't appear to be in shaky positions. Good, long-time tech journalists like Om Malik are exhausted. He recently posted
this to his blog after much ink was spilled over who Twitter hired as a public relations person:

Sure, these are some great people and everyone including me is happy for their new gigs and future success. But when I read these posts [I] often
wonder to myself, have we run out of things to say and write that actually are about technology and the companies behind them? Or do we feel
compelled to fill the white space between what matters? Sort of like talk radio?

There have been three big innovation narratives in the last few years that complicate, but don't invalidate, my thesis. The first -- The Rise of the Cloud -- was essentially a rebranding of having data on the Internet, which is, well ... what the
Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.

I also want to note that there are plenty of ambitious startups in energy, healthcare, and education, areas that sorely need innovation. But fascinating technology startups, companies who want to allow regular people to do new stuff in their daily lives? Few and far between. Take a look at Paul Graham's ideas for frighteningly ambitious startups. Now take a look at the last 30 or so startups on Techcrunch. Where are the people thinking big? What I see is people filling ever-smaller niches in this "ecosystem" or that "ecosystem."

FROM FACEBOOK TO FACEBOOK CLONES

Certainly, some of the blame for tech startup me-tooism is just the tendency of startups to cluster around ideas that seem to be working. Social networks? Here's 500! Mobile social plays? Here's another 500! Social discovery apps? Behold 1000! Perhaps that's inevitable as dumb money chases chases smart money chasing some Russian kid who just made a site on which men tended to flash their genitals at web cameras.

But I think the problems go deeper. I don't think Silicon Valley and all the other alleys and silicon places are out of ideas. But I do think that we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.

We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other
part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.

On the mobile side, we're working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a
GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That's the palette that everyone has been working with -- and I hate to say it, but we're at the
end of the line. The screen's gotten better, but when's the last time you saw an iPhone app do something that made you go, "Whoa! I didn't know that was possible!?"

Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that's as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard. It's difficult to say precisely what role this limiting factor plays, but if you start to think about what you could do if you had a 100MB/s connection everywhere you went, one's imagination starts to run wild.

LESS MONEY, MO PROBLEMS

But more than the bandwidth or the stagnant hardware, I think the blame should fall squarely on the shoulders of the business model. The dominant idea has been to gather users and get them to pour their friends, photos, writing, information, clicks,
and locations into your app. Then you sell them stuff (Amazon.com, One King's Lane) or you take that data and sell it in one way or another to someone who will sell
them stuff (everyone). I return to Jeff Hammerbacher's awesome line about developers these days: "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads."

Worse yet, all this stuff is dependent on machine learning algorithms that are crude and incredibly difficult to improve. You pour more vast
amounts of data in to eke out a bit more efficiency. That's great and all, but let's not look at that kind of behavior and call it "disruptive." That is the opposite of
disruptive.

The thing about the advertising model is that it gets people thinking small, lean. Get four college kids in a room, fuel them with pizza, and
see what thing they can crank out that their friends might like. Yay! Great! But you know what? They keep tossing out products that look pretty much like
what you'd get if you took a homogenous group of young guys in any other endeavor: Cheap, fun, and about as worldchanging as creating a new variation on beer pong.

Now, there are obviously exceptions to what I'm laying out. What I'm
talking about here is the startup culture that I've seen in literally dozens of cities. This culture has a certain logic. There are organizing principles
for what is considered a "good" idea. These ideas are supposed to be the right size and shape. There is a default spreadsheet that we expect
ideas to fit onto.

But maybe it's time that changed.

So what's the future hold then? I have a couple of ideas, even if I'm not sure they're the right ones. One basic premise I have is this: More money has got to change hands. Free is great. Free is awesome. Halloween, for example, is my favorite holiday. I love free stuff. But note this chart from the Pinboard
blog, comparing what happens to free sites and paid-for sites/services when they experience growth.

Free

Paid

Stagnant

losing money

making money

Growing

losing more money

making more money

Exploding

losing lots of money

making lots of money

The point is that every user of a free service costs the service money. Whereas every user for a paid-for service generates money. What that means is that a growing free site is an acquisition waiting to happen because its developers are burning through ever more cash.

Free applications and services get driven to do other things, too. They must grow quickly and they must collect vast amounts of data and they must acquire your social graph somehow. Even if those things were all good, they would still reduce the variety of startups that seem possible. The only metric that seems to matter with startups is the number
of users it has been able to skim from the masses. (Partially because so many can't get anyone to visit them and partially because so few of them make money.)

It's not that I think paid software and services will be necessarily be better, but I think they'll be different.

Speaking of hardware, I think we all better hope that the iPhone 5 has some crazy surprises in store for us later this year. Maybe it's a user
interface thing. Maybe it's a whole line of hardware extensions that allow for new kinds of inputs and outputs. I'm not sure what it is, but a decently
radical shift in hardware capabilities on par with phone-->smartphone or smartphone-->iPhone would be enough, I think, to provide a springboard for some new ideas.

I have some of my own, too. The cost of a lumen of light is dropping precipitously; there must be more things than lightbulbs that can benefit from that. There's vast amounts of databases, real-world data, and video that remains unindexed. Who knows what a billion Chinese Internet users will come up with? The quantified self is just getting going on its path to the programmable self. And no one has figured out how to do augmented reality in an elegant way.

The truth is, though, I'm a journalist, not an entrepreneur. I know that my contribution is more likely to be distilling a feeling
that is already broadly felt rather than inventing the future. Still, I want us to get back to those exciting days where people were making predictions about the affordances of the
future that seemed wonderful and impossible. No doubt the future remains unevenly distributed but now, when you get your bit, it seems as likely to include worse
cell reception as it does seemingly magical superpowers.

This isn't about startup incubators or policy positions. It's not about "innovation in America" or which tech blog loves startups the most. This is about how Internet technology used to feel like it was really going to change so many things about our lives. Now it has and we're all too stunned
to figure out what's next. So we watch Lana Del Ray turn circles in a thousand animated gifs.

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Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation.

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Most of the big names in futurism are men. What does that mean for the direction we’re all headed?

In the future, everyone’s going to have a robot assistant. That’s the story, at least. And as part of that long-running narrative, Facebook just launched its virtual assistant. They’re calling it Moneypenny—the secretary from the James Bond Films. Which means the symbol of our march forward, once again, ends up being a nod back. In this case, Moneypenny is a send-up to an age when Bond’s womanizing was a symbol of manliness and many women were, no matter what they wanted to be doing, secretaries.

Why can’t people imagine a future without falling into the sexist past? Why does the road ahead keep leading us back to a place that looks like the Tomorrowland of the 1950s? Well, when it comes to Moneypenny, here’s a relevant datapoint: More than two thirds of Facebook employees are men. That’s a ratio reflected among another key group: futurists.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.